Situating Class in Singapore: State Development and Labour

Abstract

While Singapore is itself becoming transformed, migration is also shaping the nature of Singapore’s engagement with the global South and within the Southeast Asian region. Many of these transformations, connections and mobilities can be seen through Singapore’s development strategies, which are the focus of this chapter. Much has been written about the dominance of the single-party state in celebrating the success of Singapore’s development model. I address how this model is premised upon the assembly of a segmented labour force that is heavily dependent on migrant workers. As Peck argues, all labour markets are “locally constituted” (1996: 95). Each local labour market is unique in that it reflects a unique intersection of its driving processes. Although every single labour market has its own entrenched gender and ethnic stratification, these do not have universal outcomes. Indeed, these processes are not operating across a tabula rasa; their realizations are very much a result of inherited social, economic and institutional geographies of the labour market. Prior forms of geographically uneven development always recreate or at least shape emergent geographies of work (Peck, 1996). This chapter demonstrates that while Singapore is an appropriate field site given its state-led globalization projects, the prominence of a transnational workforce and the importance of its international division of labour for its economic growth, it is not the only place where these processes can be witnessed.